Thank you, everybody, for attending. I'm sorry it's again online, and I hope soon we can go back to having proper breakfast with proper food. So, this is about the results since most of you know the company already, I won't bore you with a long presentation of Judges. Just to remind us of a few facts about us. So, what are we doing? We're still doing the same thing, which is doing a buy-and-build of scientific instrument companies. We believe it's a very favorable place to do a buy-and-build for three reasons I'll get to the point of later. One is the excellent long-term drivers. Second, a large pool of potential acquisitions. And thirdly, lower capital requirements. And I'll explain why this is important, although it looks surprising. Of course, this is the strategic outlook of our sector, but it's also important to take care of the execution. Two things are really key there. One is to be seen as a good acquirer. We've built up, sorry to boast, a very formidable reputation as a good acquirer. We never renegotiate deals, and people really know that we're well financed, and we treat everybody with respect. Once they've signed heads, they know that the deal will take place precisely as we've agreed. But it's also important to take care of our own company and our own shareholders. We're very disciplined in acquisition activity. We're only buying companies which are sustainable, and we only pay a sensible price for them. So because we're very disciplined, there are dry patches where we don't have any acquisition because we never want to do a deal when we're not sure. It's like the buses. They come always in groups of two or three, or sometimes even four. And the chart shows you, really, the times when we had a good time and the time when we had a bad time. I have to say that this last year, as you will see from the results, has been our most difficult year in terms of trading. But in terms of acquisition, the last 13 months have been among the very best for acquisitions because we bought three companies totaling GBP 2.5 million EBIT per year. And that's one of the best performances we've had over a period of 12 months. We think it's totally uncorrelated, but strangely, the previous worst year was 2016 in terms of trading. And it was also a fantastic year for deals, and we bought four companies totaling GBP 2 million during that year. But we don't think there's anything to do, and it's just pure coincidence. Yeah, the next slide just showed very briefly the kind of customers we deal with. We said, you know, we believe that, you know, a good half of our business is done with universities. They're not all as prestigious as the ones you've seen there. We also deal with some large industrial groups like L'Oréal and Corning, and we deal with non-university research centers like the CERN or the Allen Institute, and also with companies or state entities which deal with testing and compliance. One of the examples there is Exova. We also sometimes deal with OEMs like Rigaku or Thermo Fisher, where we sell an accessory which is implanted in a larger instrument or which is a necessary appendix to the instrument. The key messages of this period are, of course, you know, COVID has been really the cloud over the whole world and over the whole economy. It has affected principally order intake, but everything in our company comes from order intake. When order intake is low, revenues are also down, and the profits are also impacted. We've really, you know, been very careful with health and safety to make sure that all our colleagues were safe and that our factories could remain open throughout. We've been successful at that. We didn't have to close any. We've had only one of our colleagues out of 500 ended up in hospital with COVID, but he's out now, and he's well. Of course, all these actions were taken locally with idiosyncrasies of every company to make sure everybody was safe and the companies were still profitable. And we're pleased to say that we had the ability to generate significant profit in every single month in the year in spite of the COVID constraints. And we were cash-generative throughout. So as I said, it was a good year for acquisition. We bought Heath Scientific for GBP 7 million in May and Korvus for GBP 2.6 million in October. So it was a very good period. Both acquisitions are earnings-enhancing immediately. The simple fact that we were able to do two sizable deals in a year with COVID shows really that our business model is very strong and that our financial position also is solid and that we have also very, very good support from the bank who you know are entirely behind us in backing our acquisition policy even in the worst of times and not saying you know "Are you sure you want to do another deal or maybe you should take a breather?" So the outlook is still uncertain after a year of COVID. You know we're certainly not out of the pandemic yet although there are some positive signs. We've had a good progressive recovery in order after the brutal April that we had last year but it's still work in progress. But that being said, the long-term fundamentals of the group are completely unchanged, and we were able to keep building it as if COVID hadn't existed, and as a result of all this, we're proposing a 10% increase in the dividend, so this is, you know, a little bit more detailed information on COVID, what we did, our priorities, which was safety, and you know, leaving still a lot of autonomy, with our help to all the companies to do what was right for them, we haven't had what everybody thought was going to be happening, enormous supply chain issues. We've had some, and if you look at the end of the year, because of course we had a lot of problems during the year, but what remained most problematic apart from, of course, the order intake was installation. It's very difficult to send people on international trips, and then they have to stay in isolation for two weeks when they come back. So we have quite a few installations which are still overdue at the year-end, and financially, we, you know, took advantage of the furlough scheme to keep our staff although they were not allowed to work and, of course, bring them back when they were able to work. At the worst time, we had 100 people on furlough and 150 people working in the factories and 250 people working from home. As a solidarity for people who had reduced remuneration, the directors took pro rata cut in their remuneration during that period of time. And finally, because things looked really bad back in March last year, we asked the bank to repurpose GBP 5 million of our acquisition facility just to make sure we had enough working capital, but we never needed to use it, and it was repaid in December. Another performance review, and I'm going to ask Brad, please, to deal with that one. Good morning, everyone. I'm now going to take you through the key features from the past year's results. 2020 was a challenging year for the group and whilst we had to navigate our way through the pandemic and its impact on our business. W e still managed to produce a strongly profitable performance despite the circumstances. Revenues were down 3% to GBP 79.9 million, a mix of organic revenue decline partially offset by the contribution from our newly acquired businesses. Profits consequently were also impacted. We are a high fixed cost-based business, but the proactive actions taken by our businesses at an early stage enabled us to ensure that a 3% reduction in revenue only resulted in a 17% reduction in adjusted operating profits. Earnings per share also decreased by 20% to GBP 1.772, down from our record GBP 2.225 in 2019. I'll take you through a little bit of a summary on how COVID affected us this year in a short while. The 12% organic revenue drop closely aligned with the 13% drop in organic order intake. Much of this drop in organic order intake arose during the first lockdown, but after that, orders recovered somewhat through the rest of the year, and we were able to rebuild much of the order book that we consumed during H1. We finished the year with a decent order book, both on an organic basis and in total. I'll come back to order intake a little while later. The group has a strong track record and converting profit into cash, and I'm pleased to say this remains undiminished. We generated GBP 14.6 million of cash from operations at a cash conversion of over 100%, and this enabled us to support a 10% increase in the annual dividend, up GBP 0.05 to GBP 0.55 per share for 2020, and also support our strategy as a buy-and-build group. We were able to allocate GBP 11 million to acquisitions, GBP 7.3 million in purchasing THT, GBP 2.6 million in acquiring Korvus Technology, and a further GBP 1.1 million acquiring the remaining stake in PE fiber optics. All of these actions that we took, despite there being a pandemic year, only increased our net debt to GBP 5.7 million. So we finished the year still with low gearing, lots of headroom on our covenants, and in a strong financial position. And we entered 2021 with those things, with a good order book, and with a small amount of increasing confidence despite COVID-19 remaining. Moving on to the performance slide, I wanted to take you through a few components of how COVID affected our business this year, I say COVID, but COVID certainly had its effect on the overall results. But, one, the positive effect of acquisitions this year, two, the negative effect of COVID on our organic order intake, and three, the response of our businesses to the pandemic. Revenues decreased by 3%, and you can see the effect of the organic decrease in revenue offset partially by the contribution for a full- year from Moorfield and also the part year from THT and from Korvus. If you look at our operating costs, these remained stable year- on- year, which you may at first glance think's a little unusual. And so I just want to break that down a little bit further. If you look at the table on the right-hand side of the slide, you'll see the effect of this. If I talk you through the three things, one, the positive effect of the acquisitions, well, the effect on our operating costs when you add GBP 7.5 million of revenue is that we had an additional GBP 6.4 million of costs. That took us to over GBP 70 million. Offsetting this was the consequence of the decline in organic revenue from COVID, where we have a reduction in GBP 4 million in our costs as a consequence of the GBP 10 million drop in revenue. Lastly, GBP 2 million of net cost savings as a consequence of the actions taken by all our businesses. Now, I just want to break down the net cost savings just a little bit, and really there are four components here. The first and the largest, by being comfortably over GBP 1 million, relates to sales and marketing and travel. Second component was other overhead savings and staff costs. The third, the receipt of monies from the furlough scheme. And this in total made a saving of GBP 3 million. At the same time, and whilst we were preserving our profitability, what we weren't doing was sacrificing the future. And we spent a further additional GBP 1 million on R&D this year, bringing the total net saving to GBP 2 million. Moving on to tax, our effective rate on adjusted earnings was 14.8%, similar to last year. And we continue to benefit from the U.K.'s R&D tax credit scheme, which for groups like ours that invest in R&D and have less than 500 employees, is a very beneficial scheme. Lastly on this slide, for those of you less familiar with our P&L, we do have adjusting items that take us to the statutory result. The largest component of these by far is amortization of intangible assets that we're required to recognize when we acquire businesses. Our performance really hinges on order intake. I want to talk you through the graph on the right-hand side, which is a key measure for us. There are three lines on it: a red line, a black line, and a green line. The red line is our internal sales budget. We set this once a year as part of the budgeting process, and it only changes if we make an acquisition. You can see two bumps towards the far right-hand side of the graph where we acquired THT and Korvus. The far end of the graph is the end of December 2020. Against this line, we're measuring two things. The black line for trading, 12 months of orders, and the green line is the last four months of orders annualized, so what do we want from these two lines? Well, with the black line, really we want that black line to be touching the red line by the end of the year because that way we'd have had sufficient orders in the past year with which to satisfy our annual sales budget, and the green line, we're looking to really be tracking the red line because that way we've got relatively consistent orders coming in at the right sort of level. As you can see from the graph, we managed to achieve neither of that last year, so what actually happened? I think best to look at the green line because it is a shorter term, more jagged measure, and you see changes in order intake a lot more clearly, and you can see the impact of lockdown from COVID on us and the severe reduction in our order intake. At the same time, you can also see that orders recovered quite well through the rest of the year, and even come the end of the year, we're close to touching the budgeted level. However, across the year, this is why our organic order intake was down 13% in 2019. The improved orders did, however, allow us to rebuild our order book, and we finished the year with 14 weeks of organic orders and 15.8 weeks of total orders. Since the end of the year and through the first 10 weeks of 2021, organic orders have been slightly ahead of the same period in the previous year. I'm just going to briefly touch on the revenue summary. Really, it shows two key points. Really, one, we're a very high exporter. We continue to export more than 85% of what we make around the globe. And lastly, while it's been a tough year for us, you know, you can really see that we suffered in North America. Moving on to profit bridge. This slide reconciles 2019 and 2020 contribution of our businesses for central costs. The two big green blocks on the left and right-hand side of the graph, 2019 and 2020 contribution, and the three blocks in the middle explain the reasons why we've had the decline this year. Really, the big thing you can see is the challenges we've had with organic revenue decline, clearly shown in the center of this slide in the big red block. You can also see on the left-hand side the small green block, which is where four businesses in the organic group actually had better years than they had previously. Remarkably, these were actually all four record years for our businesses, which was a great feat for them. The last block is the effect of our acquisitions and the full year of Moorfield and the part year from THT and from Korvus. Overall, while this is a decline, it still paints a picture of a strongly profitable business and at the same time giving us a high watermark with which to aspire to. Balance sheet and cash flows, you know, we have an excellent track record of converting profit into cash, and we still have a strong financial position. We generated GBP 14.6 million of cash from operations in the period at 102% cash conversion, recovering well from a much lower position at the end of H1. Our working capital has consistently been less than 10% of revenue. And while the pandemic has increased it this year, we've worked hard as a group to release amounts tied up earlier in the year, particularly in relation to high levels of stock where we were assuring capacity through pandemic and through lockdown. Debtors do, however, remain a bit higher than we'd like, and this is the consequence, as David mentioned earlier, of not being able to complete installations through not being able to travel properly. But at the same time, thanks to the fantastic blue chip base of customers we have, both universities and industry, we experience minimal bad debt. Our strong cash flow provides the group with resilience in tough times and enables us to continue to execute our business model and provide growing dividends to our shareholders. As we said already, we've allocated GBP 11 million to acquisitions this year and have been able to support a 10% increase in the dividend to GBP 0.55, with a final dividend of GBP 0.385 per share. All this having been said, our net debt has only increased by GBP 3.7 million in the year to GBP 5.7 million, and we remain in a position of low gearing with significant headroom on all our covenants. We're in a strong financial position. I would like to say thanks to Lloyds Bank for their unwavering support, both through working capital support they gave us at a time of great uncertainty earlier this year and also through their unquestioning support of our acquisition strategy. They truly have been a great long-term partner for us, standing behind us as we're looking to grow the group. Moving on to ROTIC. This is a key measure, our return on total invested capital. And put simply, it's a function of the multiples we pay for the businesses we acquire. And you can see on the left-hand side of the graph when we acquired FTT in 2006, and we paid close to five times. We started around 20%. Growing ROTIC thereafter requires either improved financial performance and/or buying businesses at lower multiples. And you can see that improvement. At the same time, you can also see two very large drops in the middle of the graph when we paid higher multiples at six times each for GDS and Scientifica when the group was smaller. Smaller acquisitions now have less of an impact on ROTIC. While the pandemic has impacted our returns, we still managed to achieve 23.5% ROTIC for 2020, which compares to 31.4% in 2019. We certainly aspire over the coming year to get back towards that level. This slide shows on the left-hand side to start with a split of the revenue for all our companies, and you can see that no one single company is dominant. Each of our businesses manufactures scientific instruments for different markets, and so we're also diversified by scientific application. On the right-hand side, you can see that no single region or country overly dominates, a good picture of diversification. So our last one from me, the slide of financial history, and really this summarizes some key financial statistics about the long-term success of our group. Revenue, profits, EPS have all increased strongly over the history of our group, although, as you can see, 2020 has been an unprecedented year. And while that has impacted our returns, we are looking to bounce back. We've continued to grow our dividends at least 10% per annum, and we've done so this year with the increase of 10%. Our compound growth in dividends is still 23%. And lastly, our continued focus on cash generation serves to ensure we have resilience in tough times, enables us to quickly reduce acquisition debt, make space for further acquisitions, and be able to reward shareholders with progressively growing and well-covered dividends. And I'm going to pass you back to David now to talk through the strategy. So, growth drivers, M&A is driven by the fact that there's 2,000 businesses in our sector in the U.K., which is giving rise to quite a lot of acquisition opportunities. And there are many global niches in our sector, and we try to buy companies which are in global niches and ideally in domination of their niche. As far as organic growth is concerned, I said I would talk again about the secular organic growth trend in our sector. And there's two drivers there. One is the fantastic growth in global higher education. Just to give you an example, Unite disclosed back last year before the COVID started that the number of freshmen in U.K. universities doubled between 2000 and 2019. If you have that sort of growth in a super mature economy like the UK, you can imagine what growth you have in emerging economies. So we think this is there to stay for many, many, many, many decades. Another thing which is helping our business is the thirst for optimization of everything we do. In particular, industry is trying to always optimize their processes, and you can't optimize anything you haven't measured. So we sell the instrument to make these measurements. So apart from the long-term growth drivers, what has contributed to our own growth is the fact that in 2013, we suddenly woke up to the fact that whenever we had a new product, we were doing very well, and since that time, we've been trying to encourage our managing directors to invest more in new products. I think from that time, we probably doubled our yearly investment in research and development, and it's typically 5% to 6%. Last year it was more. It was nearly 8%. One of the reasons is because we had an aggressive budget before we knew that COVID would hit us. Of course, we didn't want to cut research and development costs because this is the future. We felt that as long as we survive, we want to secure our future. This year we of course spent what we were planning to spend, but turnover was down. It looks like we've been extremely aggressive, spending 7.7% of turnover. And then in the last three years, since we've had the benefit of Mark Lavelle as our new COO, he's been very active in optimizing every side of the business and introducing a lot of programs and a lot of things to basically help people lead better, run their business better, employ better people, and communicate with each other to make sure that the best practices that we can find in one company are adopted by the others. So acquisitions, just a few words about what we're looking for. We're really looking for companies which are strong in a niche. So if they're in a niche and they're strong, it means they're going to export a lot because the U.K. is not an enormous proportion of the world economy. And we like to have solid EBIT margin. Having a strong EBIT margin is a very good sign that your target company is not in a price battlefield. We need them to generate sustainable profit and cash flow. We've been paying in the past between three and six times EBIT. If they're bigger, we need to pay more. Bigger means EBIT over a million. We've only bought four companies with EBIT over a million, and they're difficult to buy because it's a lot more competitive than smaller companies. The bank lets us borrow up to 2.5x EBITDA, and we pay, w e say, 2%-4%, but actually at this point we pay a bit less than 2%. It's a very good source of money for us. Deals take a long time to materialize. They're difficult to find. You have a lot of disappointment, a lot of deals you pursue, you can't do them in the end. So it's a bit erratic. We provide financial certainty for the seller, and they know that what we've said we will do. And once we've signed heads, they can rest assured that they're going to have exactly the deal that they thought they were having and that it will happen because the bank is behind us. So, in May, we bought Heath Scientific. It's a company that I've known for 15 years, which was a very nice little company but not exciting. Suddenly in the last years, it became really exciting because one of the activities that they were involved in had a terrific boom is testing lithium batteries. We all know that lithium batteries are dangerous, and we all are aware of what happened to Samsung, who had to recall enormous numbers of phones which were exploding in planes. We all know that there were some Tesla cars which burned. Since then, of course, lithium batteries have to be tested. This company is the market leader in testing lithium batteries. Because there's enormous growth in lithium batteries and there's always new factories being planned in many countries in the world, we believe there's going to be a very strong market for our products. The company was making GBP 1.2 million in the year until 30th April 2020. We paid six times that plus excess cash. This was financed with our own money and borrowing from the bank. Of course, it's immediately earnings enhancing as we'd like to. This deal that I find particularly exciting because of the sector, the lithium batteries, which is growth, and also because of our familiarity with calorimetry, because FTT makes instruments which have a lot of similarities with Heath Scientific. Korvus is a company involved in physical vapor deposition and is really about creating thin films over objects. Basically, this one is a tool for academic research. It's the second company that we buy, which is involved in films on materials. Quorum, of course, that we've had for many years is also involved in thin films for life science samples. We bought this company in 2020. It has a very original product which is very versatile because it has six panels and you can change them. That's what academics want because they buy an instrument, but they don't know what they will want to do with it in three months. This is very modular and you can do a lot of different experiments by just changing these panels. In the year to March 2020, it produced GBP 700,000 EBIT. Basically we paid four times that plus a potential earn out, which is also four times the growth between March 2020 and March 2021. This was also financed with Lloyds Bank money and it's immediately earnings enhancing. Apart from these two acquisitions, we tidied up a bit our own portfolio. We still had minority holders in PFO, which is a 2005 acquisition where we backed a management team and some of the original management was still involved in having some shares. Unfortunately, we all grow older and two of the original managers have now retired. It was nice to give them their money back. We eventually, in three stages, we took out some of the shareholders and in March 2020 was the last step in that exercise and we own now 100% of PFO. It may look strange that in March 2020, just at the beginning of COVID, when everybody was looking in every drawer for money they could put their hand on, that we go and pay GBP 1.1 million for minority stake in a company which we control. In fact, it didn't diminish the money available to us because there was GBP 1.1 million in the company, so which we couldn't use for our own purpose. So now, of course, that in terms of immediate cash availability, this was neutral. After the end of the year, we also dealt with the minorities in Bordeaux Acquisition and we bought roughly half of the minorities there and we paid GBP 1.8 million. And this was really based on an enterprise value that we calculated of nearly GBP 13 million, which is really four and a half times the EBIT generated in 2020 by Bordeaux. Bordeaux, I remind you, owns two companies, Deben and Oxford Cryo. So post-acquisition, what do we do? Well, strong financial controls and we try to create an environment where the businesses are going to thrive. Every business here has an excellent managing director and we never buy a business without knowing who's going to run it and be happy with who's going to run it. And often selling owner says he wants to run it. We never believe him and we always have a plan B, but it doesn't always work like this in the fullness of time. And of course, you know, we have issues of succession planning more and more in our group because we've been at it for 15 years and people do get older and they do retire. So we have more and more issues with succession and we have to deal with all this. But really all this is the domain of Mark Lavelle and I would like to pass on to him so he tells you a bit more about what we do with these companies once we own them. Thank you, David. As David said, a large part of the success of Judges is by buying the right companies at sensible prices. But as the company, as the group grows, what we do with the companies we have becomes increasingly important. So let me just talk a little bit about what we do with the businesses once we've acquired them. I think it's really important to say, to start off by saying that Judges is not a story about synergies and cost savings. What Judges is about is having a great portfolio of independent businesses and inspiring and enabling each of those businesses to grow more and better, typically by expanding their geographical reach and by increasing investment in new product development. We also do a little bit of improvement in the basics, but all of this is done by a sort of cunning mix of having the right MD in place, sorting out some training, but also encouraging the MDs to learn from each other and do a lot of cross-fertilization. As David said, you know, typically when we take on a business, the first thing we need to do is just to make sure that the financial basics are in place. We inherit quite a number of businesses that aren't used to producing monthly accounts, that often don't do monthly stock takes and certainly don't do monthly forecasts. And, you know, experience has shown that having those basics in place is really important to moving the businesses forward. Now, quite often, actually, the staff at a business are perfectly capable of doing this, even if they've not been asked to before. So our head office finance team led by Brad will work with them alongside myself just to make sure that we've got the financial basics in place. But the next issue really becomes the MD because without great leadership, we can't have great, independent businesses. Now, it just so happens that the last three acquisitions, one at the end of 2019 and two during the year we're talking about, in some ways have rather neatly demonstrated the three different ways that we go about putting an MD in place. So in the case of the first of those three, Moorfield, it was almost a sort of perfect case study of what we like to do with the business. So we had a more mature owner who'd started the business and wanted to sell it, but while he was there, he'd hired a PhD who was a specialist in the industry that the business specialized in, made him a sales director and over a period of time coached him as a potential successor. So by the time we got the business, the sales director was in a great position to take over. That happened over the year, the first year that we owned a business. I spent quite a lot of time with the MD, coaching him in the sort of skills he needed as an MD within the Judges Group. I got him involved in a number of group sessions with the other MDs, and very quickly over that time, that MD became an extremely successful and very competent leader of his business. Another key aspect of that is making sure that he then in hires, enables the people in the business that are there already to grow and also hires good people into the business. And again, that's that has typically been a very important part of the MD's development is making sure that they set the bar very high for new acquisitions of talent. So that one, as I say, very much a case study, exactly how we like to do it. PhD in the company, sales director background, and promoted up to MD. And importantly, we also keep very good relationships with the departing MD, who was, who's often comes along as a non-executive director or as a consultant to the business as well. So we had a slightly different trajectory within THT in that we had a situation there where the MD retired, but there wasn't, yet, somebody who was ready to take over the business, as MD. And therefore we were in a position to bring somebody in, which we did extremely quickly within the first couple of weeks of owning the business. That's an experienced MD that we've used two or three times before within the group, and he was able to show the team there what an experienced MD looked like, and to do all the things that we like to do. He already knew many of the things we like to see in businesses and was able to bring the team quickly up to standard, including all the finance stuff I've talked about. That was also a nice example of there was one particular issue that the company wished to sort out there, and we were able to use internal resources of the group to show him the sorts of, sorry, to show the company, the sorts of improvements that they could make. And those are in process at the moment, to do with production optimization. And then the third example is the one that David mentioned, which is Korvus. And we have a significantly smaller business than usual there, as David said, just a husband and wife team. And one of the challenges there was, although we have some useful knowledge in the group about the market, we were in a position where we needed somewhere to build the new instruments. And we were able to find somewhere in the group where the technology and the people were very suitable for building the Korvus instruments. So the Korvus site has now been, is in the process of being moved. So we're in some ways using, although I said we don't do it very often, some elements of the synergies of the manufacturing around the group, in that particular case. So as I say, three very different examples which we've seen over the last three acquisitions of a good MD that we've inherited, an MD that we've had to put in, and a business that we've managed to fit within the group in a slightly different way. And then over the long term, you know, my role's very much about inspiring all those businesses and the MDs in them in particular to hire great teams and then continue to raise the bar in everything they do, be that in new product development, manufacturing, or their sales reach. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Mark. To summarize the outlook, you know, we still live in a time of great uncertainty in spite of positive signs even before vaccination started to accelerate. But now we have a big increase in vaccination, predominantly in the U.K. and the U.S. And the U.S. has been a very difficult market for us. Europe is much slower, but you know, if we hope that there will be also a good acceleration and this will be helpful for us to travel and see our customers again. In the longer term, of course, there's a question mark about research funding and university financing and generally, public spending. We see the governments are being very generous, and printing money very, in a relaxed fashion. But of course, this often leads to periods of austerity, and we can expect that the next 10 years are going to be like the 10 years which followed the meltdown in 2008, a succession of periods of austerity and of periods of stimulation. And we just need to hope it's not everywhere at the same time. As far as current trading is concerned, you know, we start the year with a good order book. This is partly because we had a very good December. The first 10 weeks, organic orders were slightly ahead of the previous year, so we're not too unhappy with that. We keep an eye on safety. Safety remains very important in our mind. We have great confidence in our business model, which showed good resilience in this very, very difficult year. With a strong balance sheet, we believe the long-term fundamentals of our group have not been affected at all by this difficult year. And we can keep doing what we do, which is grow the companies we own and doing the deals. Of course, we keep completely focused on shareholder value, and we remember always that shareholders are also stakeholders. That's our investment case. You know, we have a good business model. We pursue it with discipline, with a lot of targets, good growth drivers, good diversity in geography and scientific applications, and a complete focus of management on shareholder value to generate profitability, cash, reducing debt, growing the dividend, and producing good return on the capital we invest. We are proposing a dividend increase of 10%. We have an unwritten rule of increasing the dividend by no less than 10%, and we've done this for the past 15 years. In fact, we've actually grown the dividend by compound 23% over that period, and it's still well covered, and we hope to be able to keep doing that for many years in the future. And of course, last but not least, for private shareholders who are not young, the shares are exonerated from inheritance tax if they've been held at least two years. Yeah, we open now for questions, please. We'll go to Robin Speakman at Shore Cap. Good morning, everybody. Yeah. I guess a question for Mark. I mean, clearly we know that, you know, in the early months of 2020, there was some order book contraction to the benefit of the group And I just wondered really, you know, whether that's a process that you think you can return to in recovery, to if you like see stronger revenue flow. Also in the vacuum group, the margin performance there stood out last year relative to the material sciences group. The margin looks like you actually gained a little bit of margin through 2020, j ust wondered whether there were any particular standout businesses in the vacuum group or whether there were other factors. Robin, I might do the second question that you aimed at, Mark, if you don't mind. I think you know very well that we don't manage our businesses on a segmental basis, so anything that happens is really a coincidence. I think you need to look at the group's performance as a whole, rather than just on a segmental basis, simply because that's how we run the business. You know, it's, you know, I when I talked earlier about the profit bridge, you saw four of our businesses had their best year and others suffered. You know, if you'd put a list of all our businesses out before the lockdown and predict what were going to be the four best performing businesses, I can absolutely assure you you would have been wrong, as we would have been, as pretty much anyone would have been. So there wasn't any specific reason for any single business or any single part of the market. It just happens to be how we've allocated these to relatively arbitrary segments, if we're honest about it. But I should let Mark answer the first question because that's certainly a one that we should answer. Yeah. I mean, let me just add on to that because we've got relatively small businesses in all cases. The volume, that's the fixed cost prediction, particularly in the production area, are pretty fixed. Therefore, margins are relatively volume dependent. In terms of order books, I think that increasingly at the moment, sort of as Brad answered, every company seems to be different. We've got a couple of businesses which have had such strong inflows of orders that they're struggling to get orders out because the demand has been so high, and others which have been a little down on, you know, previous years. Therefore, I am sort of nervous about trying to pick out any general trends in order books within that simply because it's just an accumulation of 17 different stories really. But I think probably the place I would point to would actually be David's point about installations. We do have a few situations where we can't complete orders because we can't travel to foreign countries effectively and come back. You know, in some cases, we're not allowed in, but in some cases, you know, it doesn't make a lot of sense to send someone to a country for two days to then isolate for two weeks on the way back, and despite some arguments with local MPs, we've not managed to secure a sensible exemption for people going abroad to install and then returning, so I'm sorry not to give you much of a specific answer, but I just think it's really 17 different stories, to be honest. Okay. Okay. And can I just ask quickly about the sort of academic balance within the business that you've seen? Have you seen more of a hit through 2020 from academia than from industry? And what do you think the outlook is for academia in particular? Can I partly answer that, Mark? And let you top and tail it. But Robin, as you know, we don't find it very easy to be able to measure exactly where our sales go to because much of which is done through distributors. And of course, then we don't see the end customer. So our sense has always been that around 2/3 of our business is either directly or indirectly publicly financed, but and therefore the remaining 1/3 is through industry. But it's very much a case of sort of sense and instinct rather than being able to scientifically measure the end customer for the reasons I've just said. I think it was evident to us that we suffered a bit through industry through last year as a consequence of capital budgets being frozen, and I think we're beginning to see anecdotally again that the budgets are being released, because businesses do want to, you know, get back to where they were and continue to grow, and of course investing in CapEx is important for them. At the same time in universities, you know, some remain shut, some have opened up, and, you know, people have worked out ways of working, but some things have affected us. For instance, where procurement departments have been left at home, working from home has meant that we've had immense delays in getting orders processed, et cetera. So I think we have effects in different ways, but I don't think it's very clear to see any obvious effect from any of our business other than the fact that you've seen as a whole last year, we were affected 13% down on organic orders. And this year we're, you know, we've started the year slightly better than we started last year. Yeah. I suppose one little trend that we have spotted, I think within the education is that undergraduate relevant equipment is probably a little down, particularly in Europe and the U.S. and not so much in Asia. But where you've got PhDs and pure research projects, particularly funded by external organizations. So, you know, sometimes a PhD or a research project in a university will be funded by the university, and some of those have got slowed down. But where there's a piece of European funding or some other external body, those teams seem to have gone ahead pretty, pretty well, so that's again, it, you know, slightly anecdotal, and I can't produce a spreadsheet with those written down, with percentages, but just the vibe around the business is that as far as university research is concerned, it's the external funding that's been particularly robust. And we'll go to Sanjay Vidyarthi at Liberum. Morning all. A couple of questions for me. First one, in terms of the R&D spending, encouraging to see the growth in the last year. Just wondering if there were any particular projects that particularly drove that and how we should think about the growth in the year ahead for R&D spend? Well, I've gotta say that we don't have any significant projects. I think we've had one significant project in about five years where we might have spent GBP 500,000 on a particular new product. Otherwise, the vast majority of what we do are small projects. Just what you're seeing in total is an accumulation of those, whether they're being for, as they are in the most part for improvements to products rather than just pure new products. In terms of next year, I think it's sort of much of the same really. Again, it's going to depend on how the year progresses. Our R&D teams, as much as we'd love them to purely be able to work on R&D projects, often are sidetracked with other things within the business and helping operations, et cetera. So, you know, the aim will be to continue to do much of the same and hopefully, the remainder of the business will allow them to do so. Okay. Thanks. The second question is, operationally, any changes that you've had to make as a result of COVID? Do you think there are things that might stick, that ways of doing things differently or better? Do you think, for example, from a travel perspective, I know there's always, there's always going to be an essential part of the business, but are there areas where video conferencing, et cetera, may start to reduce costs? What are your thoughts about anything operationally that's changed, which you think actually that may be the way we do it? Okay. I think that something that's really struck me is that particularly in small businesses and, you know, particularly in engineering, it's often not at the forefront of modern thinking, let's put it that way. I wouldn't say they're old-fashioned, but, you know, that we're not Google as far as a lot of our management thinking is concerned in many businesses. But, and I think therefore that something like home working is often just a matter of pure trust. You know, the MD's not convinced that if the staff go home, they're actually going to do any work, so he doesn't let them. Now, I think what people have discovered over this is that actually you can trust the vast majority of your staff. And therefore, I think that purely from a trust point of view, there will be lots more opportunities for people to work from home, particularly in the admin side. Obviously, there's very little that someone in production can do at home. There's a bit that R&D guys can do at home, but not so much. And as far as you talk about on the sales side, I do think that everybody in sales seems to be gagging to get back to conferences and personal trips. I think there'll be a little bit more online stuff. And I think, you know, that meeting that you might have flown across the world to Japan to for an hour, you might do by Skype. But I think a lot of the routine businesses are going to be routine meetings, and particularly the seminars and the exhibitions. People I think in the short term are going to be gagging to get back to. And that's the end of questions. David, do you have any closing remarks? Thank you very much, Tamsin. My only closing remark is, you know, to thank you all for attending. Again, I'm sure we can produce results ahead of 2019. I hope we can resume our growth very soon and that our next meeting is in the flesh with a proper breakfast. Thanks to all for coming.